Philosophically, it doesn't. No art project needs to exist. Neither did the first HN client app, or any of the dozen HN readers on the app store.

But "Why does it need to exist?" kills every art project, side project, or anything built for the love of building. None of those need to exist either.

There's also the argument that if something isn't forbidden, it should be allowed. The way you lose rights over time is by your existing rights getting clipped off at the edges.

A lot of the criticisms leveled at me here would also apply vs Google back when Larry and Sergey were grad students. If they'd had to worry that indexing content equals copyright infringement, they'd have a steep hill to climb.

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akerl_ 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Except this isn't indexing, this is creating a replacement frontend.

> There's also the argument that if something isn't forbidden, it should be allowed

That's a really fun legal argument but a pretty irrelevant ethical one.

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krapp 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know why people decided to jump on this one specific project but there have been numerous replacement frontends for HN published over the years, and put on Show HN. And clones of HN. And datasets of HN comments.

	▲	akerl_ 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I can't speak for other people, but I commented here because the person I replied to shared their project and then in response to concerns about it copying other people's content, tried to position that first as being OK because they'd offer opt-out, and then said that was viable because if it were opt-in the site wouldn't be possible.

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ButlerianJihad 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> replacement frontend

No, they are not "replacement frontends". Those are known as "3rd party clients". These are not clients but clones. They are cloning all the content. That means they've replicated the backend, the frontend, and the database full of content, by scraping/pirating it from the original source.

old.reddit.com is an "alternative frontend". Clones of scraped content are not.

	▲	akerl_ 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It feels odd to nitpick the terminology of somebody who is agreeing with your concern.